Creature Combination: Endless Runner

The spinning mechanic is really fun actually, there's a really good amount of risk/reward there. Almost every time I died, it was because I tried to spin just one more time! On that mechanic, though, I'd like to see a bit of inertia on the spin, so you don't stop immediately. I think that would make it feel better, and it would be riskier to keep spinning and build up your spin momentum. I don't understand why I could spin on the ground, and it felt weird to land at an angle and continue "running" at an angle, that's a bug with your main mechanic that I would consider fixing quickly.

On that - spinning is clearly the main mechanic, so why is the combination stuff there? It doesn't feel like it serves the gameplay, it kinda feels shoehorned in - as if you had to do that, and I can't quite work out why. If I were you, I would strongly consider removing that mechanic entirely. At least make a prototype without it, and see if it significantly changes the feel of the game!

I won't comment much on visual style, because it is clearly a mechanics-focused prototype, but I will say that you need to consider your use of colour. Your game is oversaturated, if I were you I'd stick to existing palettes - check https://lospec.com/palette-list 🙂

You might be interested in the live feedback events we run on our discord server - every Thursday at 19:00 UTC/12:00 PT - that's today, in a few hours! 

There were a few bugs. I'll quickly list them here in case there were any you aren't aware of:

• the game freezes for a few seconds after you die, before the game over screen comes up - not sure why this is, but it feels bad!
• Collecting one of the squares in the sky resets your jump, so you can actually jump infinitely - though it seems like your jump adds to your vertical velocity, so if you're falling it only slows you down a little. 
  • Side note, that's not really how game jumps usually work 😉
• I can spin while on the ground, and my rotation isn't ever reset, both of which feel weird
• You've got the typical endless runner prototype issue of not being able to react in time to certain obstacles. Generally to solve that you can do a few things:
  • check the player's height and vertical velocity when you spawn an object, and make decisions about what to spawn based on that. E.g. if they are low and moving up, don't spawn something high
  • give the player more warning - kinda like tetris does with block previews, you can indicate whether the next block is going high or low
• don't know where to put this, but I never have any idea what the pieces do. Gun to my head I'd say 95% of them do nothing 🙃